This course will become read-only in the near future. Tell us at community.p2pu.org if that is a problem.

Educational theories that help us understand how groups learn together, and how design of collaborative learning environments

Through an eight-week course, provide an overview of the field of CSCL, including some consideration of how it is situated within the broader fields of educational technology, and education, as well as its history. Through a focus on a few important topics, let students read seminal papers in the field, and engage meaningfully with relevant theories and approaches. Provide an overview over key theoretical perspectives, as well as case studies of a few well-known CSCL platforms.

Full Description

Please read the below, as well as the different "Tasks" (left sidebar towards the bottom), and then if you are interested in being a core member, click on apply to "sign up", if you want to follow along, you can "Follow" (button on left sidebar) the course. Course will start on April 25th, 2011.

Introduction to the field of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning

organized by Stian Haklev and Monica Resendes at P2PU

Target groupGraduate students in educational technology interested in the field of CSCL - many of whom do not have access to appropriate courses at their own institutionsPeople active in the open education movement, involved with MOOCs etc, who are interested in how this academic field can benefit their projectsAnyone else - teachers? (Unlikely that many will find out about it). We expect a minimum level of educational theory, etc.

PurposeThrough an eight-week course, provide an overview of the field of CSCL, including some consideration of how it is situated within the broader fields of educational technology, and education, as well as its history. Through a focus on a few important topics, let students read seminal papers in the field, and engage meaningfully with relevant theories and approaches. Provide an overview over key theoretical perspectives, as well as case studies of a few well-known CSCL platforms.

OrganizationTraditional P2PU courses differ from more open-ended networked courses in that there is a specific number of participants who go through an application process, and make a social commitment to completing the course. This course will both feature this core group of people, but will also be open to ‘peripheral participation’ by anyone, without any obligation.

Core groupPeople wishing to be part of the core group must apply, supplying information about themselves, and answering a sign-up question. They will be informed that they are expected to complete the course, and reserve a certain amount of time each week for the duration of the course. They will be able to post on the P2PU course site, and their blogs will be aggregated in the main activity stream of the course.

Peripheral networkAll learning materials in the course, and all learning interactions, will be publicly viewable by anyone without requiring logging in. People who choose to register at P2PU can “follow” the course, which implies no social obligation, and simply makes available the same activity stream and (optionally) e-mail notifications as the core students receive. Peripheral participants are free to self-organize outside the P2PU platform, and engage with the learning materials and discussions in any way they wish, for example by blogging. If the use the #csclintro hashtag, their contributions will be syndicated in a publicly visible place, and the course organizers will also curate a collection of the best external material and include this in their regular updates.

BadgesP2PU Badges (http://badges.p2pu.org) is an experimental website where students can “challenge” certain badges by linking to evidence of meeting the stated criteria. Others can vote up or down, according to the posted rubric (see example http://goo.gl/QczSm). The completion of the course will be based on acquiring a number of badges. There will be four competency-based badges, organized around the four main topics of the course (foundational theories, knowledge building, design of collaborative learning environments, and case studies). To obtain these badges, learners will have to demonstrate an understanding of these topics, evidenced by a link to a blog post or other external artefact.

There will also be a few collaboration and contribution (C+C) badges. For example, learners are asked to contribute to a CSCL wiki, where we will be collecting profiles of prominent CSCL researchers, important CSCL tools, CSCL theories, etc. Contributing one new page, and editing one existing page, will give the learner the wiki badge. There might also be badges for volunteering to lead discussions one week, etc.

To complete the course, learners must challenge the course meta-badge. This requires evidence of completing all four competency badges, and at least one C+C badge, as well as a reflection on the course (and evidence of helping evaluate other’s badge challenges).

The two course organizers will participate in all course activities alongside all other learners, and will also have to complete the requisite number of badges, in order to formally complete the course. The group that successfully completes the course will receive a physical diploma, signed by all completing students equally.

Peripheral participants are also welcome to challenge the same badges, as long as they find someone willing to assess their contributions.

CommunicationThere will be a few obligatory readings for each week, together with a list of additional resources (ideally, this resource will grow as the course progresses, becoming a valuable annotated bibliography of freely available CSCL literature). For core students, there will be a discussion forum available on the P2PU platform. They will also be encouraged to blog on their own external blogs, which will be syndicated into the platform. There will be a one hour meeting in Big Blue Button every week, sometimes with guest presenters. The course organizers will post brief YouTube videos summarizing each week, and send out bi-weekly updates, pointing out interesting external resources, etc.

Core students are also welcome to experiment with external platforms, such as mind-mapping tools, graphical discourse environments, etc. There will be a CSCL wiki, either on wiki.p2pu.org, or in an external location, where we will try to capture the most valuable contributions that come up during the course.

Course schedule and topics

(we will post more detailed lists of readings for each week)

Week

Starts

Topic

1

April 25

Intro to the course, intro to the field - constructivism, Lave & Wenger

No, we were still planning on using it. I put up a link to it in The Bi-Weekly #2 - but I should have reiterated in the subsequent newsletter. My mistake!

I sent out the request about meeting times this afternoon because I had just went in to check if anyone marked off times in 'whenisgood' and there were none, so I thought a message would be more effective.

What we can do is have Sat at 5pm as a default time, but there will be links in both bi-weeklies to 'whenisgood' in case people want to set up an alternate time in upcoming weeks.

1. Topics to discuss: I’d like to discuss the papers by 1) Suthers and 2) Stahl et al., if anyone else is interested in these - the main points and anything of interest.

2. Group artefact: I’m not as enthusiastic about writing a paper as I was before simply because of time issues and a fair amount of other commitments already. But I’d be up for something else :) Let's discuss possibilities.

3. Pressing concerns about the course: None, it’s great! I just wish there were 48 hours in a day…

I thought these questions were worth repeating... why are you here? what is our shared goal? The sign-up task for the course asked you to do this, however those responses are not accessible to the group! It would definitely be worth our while to contribute to the etherpad Joe has created to start digging into these questions: http://piratepad.net/introcscl

Or go ahead and create a blog post outlining your own work and ideas, as well as your thoughts about how we can collectively create a useful OER, and link to it. If this week is super busy and you only have a few minutes, you can upload a video -- Stian did a nice job of conveying his motivations and goals for the course in his intro video. This might be a useful approach if you're pressed for time!

Thanks for setting up the piratepad, Joe. I think that it's worth restating our individual goals and also to think about articulating a collective goal for the course, now that we are a week into the course. I like Joe's suggested collective goal statement for the course: Create an OER that will be useful to others interested in CSCL.

I think having a concrete goal will go a long way towards helping us to approximate a community of practice, if it is possible to do so in an 8 week, online course. If we agree that his is a goal we all want to work towards, it might be worth considering fairly early on how we can make this resource useful to others, what form the OER resource will take, and how we can make our OER available to others.

Regarding the "Community of Practice" idea: can you or someone else please summarize the case for wanting to approximate one, and the satisfaction criteria involved? The Engestrom paper I mentioned does a reasonable job making the case against, in the form of a few anti-features. Communities of Practice are said to have fixed boundaries and initiation rituals, which Engestrom finds to be unrealistic. The origins of the CoP idea appear to be associated with the paper Institutional Ecology, Translations, and Coherence: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-1939 and I just wonder whether these patterns are what we want to emulate in the course or not.

That's not to say that we shouldn't have some norms or practices: but pinning them to the CoP star may or may not be what we want to do.

Thanks for the link to the article, Institutional Ecology, Translations, and Coherence: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. I read through it to see if I could trace the origins of CoPs to it. I'm interested to know how you came to this article.

The connections I see to CoPs are:

Participants in the community share a common goal; in the case of the article, to preserve California's natural ecology

Participants come from a range of backgrounds and may have different individual goals and different methodological approaches

"Method controls' may be a useful way of ensuring that all participants create useful boundary objects: objects that "inhabit multiple worlds simultaneously, but which must meet the demands of each one." p. 408

Creating standards of practice is like fabricating a mesh: the mesh must be fine enough to filter out artefacts that are not useful to the community because they do not meet a minimum standard, and the mesh must not be so fine that the contributions of group members will be excluded.

In addition to "method controls", other means of ensuring a cohesive set of community practice may emerge through the process of the work itself

There is also a sense that the work of the knowledge community must leave a usable legacy that will be beneficial for future knowledge workers

I just posted my answer to the question of whether we (our learning community) at P2PU are a CoP at my blog, please see http://jenniferclaro.wordpress.com/2011/05/04/220/ . My post doesn't directly answer your question but it is related. I haven't read the article you suggested by Engestrom (but I've printed it) and I need to get back into some situated cognition articles, so this is a rather situated response. I hope to extend it later on.

I mentioned in my post responding to Monica's week 1 questions that I thought we could loosely resemble a CoP in this course, with the emphasis on loosening the definition and not applying it specifically to the participation in this course, this term, right now. In following a handful of open online courses, I've noticed a common set of practices and norms, from the requirement to set up one's own blog where assignments are postes to the Downes-style "Daily" (in this case bi-weekly) email summary of distributed course activity. I think "online peer learners" is something closer to the community of practice we are building than "online peer learners participating in p2pu's cscl-intro course in the spring of 2011". It is kind of like a profession's CoP but there is no board that determines entry requirements. Is it a new development in CoP's to have open borders, or does that still disqualify online peer learners from being a community of practice?

In any case, the language of networks (or Personal Learning Networks) may still be more applicable to participation in this course than that of Community of Practice theory. But I do like the notion that in CoPs there is a semblance of shared goals, shared norms, and an expectation of cooperation. Those may be useful concepts to emulate.

One thing I felt was missing from the first meeting was a discussion about the goals for the course. Our organizers have made a very nice and detailed plan, but I think that since this is a peer course it would be very useful to collect everyone's individual motivations. We got into that a little bit in our self-introductions, but the meeting was rather chaotic. Accordingly I am copying the outline from the plan above into an etherpad where we can discuss it at our leisure: http://piratepad.net/introcscl

Perhaps the pad can itself grow to become a useful "output" of the course.